Ringfort (Cashel), Derrycreeveen, Co. Cork
Co. Cork |
Ringforts
There is a site in Derrycreeveen, on the Beara Peninsula, that exists almost entirely as an absence.
On a north-facing terrace of pasture land, with Berehaven Harbour spread out below and the Caha Mountains rising beyond, there is nothing to see at ground level, and that is precisely the point. What once stood here was a cashel, a type of stone-built ringfort enclosed by a dry-stone wall rather than an earthen bank, and by all local accounts it was removed completely at some point in the past, leaving the land as smooth and unremarkable as any other grazed field in the area.
The removal of cashels was not uncommon in rural Ireland, particularly during periods of agricultural improvement when ancient stone structures were simply quarried for field walls, building foundations, or road fill. No record survives, apparently, of when this particular cashel was dismantled or by whom. What local knowledge has preserved is the fact that it existed at all, and that the terrace it occupied was a considered choice of location, the kind of elevated, outward-facing position that early medieval communities favoured for both practical and symbolic reasons. Roughly twenty metres to the south-west, there is a possible souterrain associated with the site, an underground stone-lined passage or chamber of the sort that often accompanied cashels and ringforts, used variously for storage, refuge, or as a cool space for dairy produce. Whether that feature survives in any form beneath the ground is not recorded.
The landscape itself carries the weight of what is missing. The view north across Berehaven Harbour toward the Caha Mountains is the same view whoever built and inhabited the cashel would have had, and the terrace they chose still reads, even now, as a place someone once decided mattered.

